Adaptive Path Blog

Two years after it launched, the New York Times pulls the plug on TimesSelect. Their rationale?

“Since we launched TimesSelect in 2005, the online landscape has altered significantly. Readers increasingly find news through search, as well as through social networks, blogs and other online sources. In light of this shift, we believe offering unfettered access to New York Times reporting and analysis best serves the interest of our readers, our brand and the long-term vitality of our journalism.”

I’m happy to see the Times reconsider its poor decision making. It’s refreshing to see an older, more established organization begin to question fundamental assumptions about its business and brand. What continues to mystify me is that it took two years to see the writing on the wall.

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This morning, Yahoo!’s homepage featured a story on the most hated Internet words. It got me thinking about the terms that we hear abused all the time. “Blog”, “netiquette”, “cookie” and “wiki” have been voted among the most irritating words spawned by the Internet. Any additions to the short list?

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I used to see Kurt Vonnegut on the street in New York from time to time. He died last night. So it goes.

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Last year we had the pleasure of hosting John Bjerke, now a senior at the Marin School of Arts and Technology (MSAT) for a spring internship. He was in the middle of redesigning his school’s web site and asked to come work with us at Adaptive Path two days a week as he moved through the project.

We’re glad the experience didn’t frighten him off.

John has joined us again this spring, as part of MSAT’s Workplace Learning Experience internship program, and we’re thrilled to have him back. This time around John is helping us build a mini website for UX Intensive, which we will be hosting in Chicago April 23-26. He’s helping us out with everything from concept development, information architecture and development and has been doing a great job. Even more exciting, he’s blogging the whole thing. Welcome back, Bjerke!

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Jeff Veen has posted about the nifty race tracker that Adobe has developed for the Tour of California bicycle race. Its worth a look. Its also worth noting that Quokka Sports tried this kind of stuff back at the height of the boom, and failed spectacularly. We’ll see how it goes this time around.

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Pete Mortenson’s post about Steve Ballmer’s reaction to to iPhone got me thinking about the intersection between user experience, quality and pricing. Ballmer’s negative response focused on pricing and the iPhone’s unsuitability for business customers. The business customer argument doesn’t hold much water, mainly because Apple isn’t targeting the business audience with this product. So much for that argument.

According to BallmerMicrosoft’s “strategy” in this case is pretty clear. Devices that run Windows Mobile like the Motorola Q are “very capable… it’ll do music, it’ll do Internet, it’ll do email, it’ll do instant messaging. So I look at that and I say I like our strategy, I like it a lot.” The only issue with this is that those aren’t strategies, those are features that are easily copied and improved upon.

The criticism of Apple’s iPhone pricing has gotten some traction though. Expensive? Certainly. But taken from the classic, Michael E. Porter perspective, the iPhone’s pricing, and the strategy behind it is dead on.

Here’s why:

Trade-offs are essential to strategy and price/quality is the granddaddy of trade-offs. Quality, in the iPhone’s case, is the phone’s user experience. A touch screen, motion sensors that tilt the display automatically, a fantastic form factor. How these features work together in concert is the difference. Great user experience doesn’t come cheap. It costs money for design, engineering, prototyping and testing, something that we know Apple does compulsively. And in doing so, they create products and software that deliver a great user experience. Apple’s Q1 numbers back that up.

Here we have the CEO of the world’s largest software company calling feature parity a strategy and making the most superficial of price/quality arguments. What Ballmer and much of Microsoft don’t understand, and what is borne out by many of their products, is that there is a legitimate trade-off between cost and user experience. Apple understands that although good user experiences are expensive, they deliver value. That’s why they can charge an arm and a leg for a phone. Consumers understand the value of a good user experience.

Too bad for Microsoft Steve Ballmer doesn’t.

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Mohawk Fine Papers has published a book of 40 posters designed for the Yale School of Architecture by Michael Bierut. A small sampling of these stunning pieces are posted over at Design Observer. Points of interest: each poster features different typefaces, an adherence to the simplicity (and low printing cost) of black and white, the use of simple geometric forms to create complex layouts. One poster, for “Non Standard Structures: An Organic Order of Irregular Geometries, Hybrid Members, and Chaotic Assemblies Symposium” was featured in Michael’s talk at UX Week 2006.

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One of the things we always look for when conducting field research is how people use products in unorthodox ways. These are the situations that clearly aren’t intended by the designers, covered in the instructions or in the manufacturer’s warranty, but still make sense. Some of the best that I have seen include:

• The use of MS Access to store a few addresses
• Taking an extremely non-portable home stereo on vacation because nothing else sounded quite as good
• The willingness of ultralight backpackers to try just about anything to lighten their loads

The military’s use of Silly String to detect tripwires takes the cake though.

What unexpected adaptations have you seen?

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This weekend’s New York Times Magazine features an excellent and lengthy piece on the intelligence community’s efforts to update its analysis capabilities by leveraging blogs, wikis and the like. The author, Clive Thompson, has previously written on Google’s dealings with China.

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Among both liberals and conservatives, he was one of the great giants of 20th century economics.

“What was really so important about him,” said W. Allen Wallis, a former classmate and later faculty colleague at the University of Chicago, “was his tremendous basic intelligence, his ingenuity, perseverance, his way of getting to the bottom of things — of looking at them in a new way that turned out to be right.”

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